Privacy Browser Android

As privacy guy already knows, but for the benefit of anyone else who may follow this issue, the long start time is caused by the loading of the blocklists as described at https://www.stoutner.com/privacy-browser/blocklists/ and https://www.stoutner.com/privacy-browser-2-8/. These blocklists are quite significant and require several seconds of CPU processing time depending on one's hardware.

Creating a semi-functional GUI while the blocklists are loading that doesn't introduce other bugs is a surprisingly difficult task because of the way Android's lifecycle and GUI thread are designed. I am already planning on creating a "Loading Blocklists" message as described in https://redmine.stoutner.com/issues/285 but this will also require a surprisingly large amount of code refactoring.

However, to get at the core of the problem, I have also been considering ways to speed up the processing of the blocklists so the delay is not significant. One possibility is to convert the blocklists from their native format to a SQLite database that more closely mirrors the data structures used by the ArrayLists. I am not sure this will speed things up, but it is likely enough that I plant to spend some time investigating the possibility. This is likely to be a time-consuming process, and as such, I am planning to delay it until after the addition of tabbed browsing, which is a much desired feature.

SQLite can't handle string arrays natively, which makes me want to rethink the direction I should go.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9053685/android-sqlite-saving-string-array

The current internal structure of the blocklists uses string arrays. I could be possible to redesign them some other way, but that might end up slowing things down instead of speeding them up.

I could also look at compressing the string arrays into a single string or into a byte array, but that might also increase the total processing time instead of decreasing it.

I think I am going to sit on this a while longer before I make a decision on how to proceed.